


The Opposite Of Loneliness

by junkshopdisco



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: M/M, Modern AU, a lot of music puns, and a goth bar, bee gees jokes, birthday fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-20
Updated: 2017-04-20
Packaged: 2018-10-21 10:21:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10683324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junkshopdisco/pseuds/junkshopdisco
Summary: Gwaine learns that loneliness is throwing yourself a fake birthday party in a goth theme pub, and everyone coming except the one person you really wanted to be there.





	The Opposite Of Loneliness

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicating this repost to Matchsticks, who has been texting me jokes from it today <3

Gwaine once heard someone say – someone steeped in gin and recently jilted, most likely – that loneliness is standing in a room full of people and knowing none of them would really care if you weren’t there. At the time he’d thought – well, very little, being as he was lost to his own cocktail of melancholy and whiskey – but _later_ , when he’d woken under a table – actually he hadn’t thought about it then, either. He’d freaked out because having a plank of wood inches from his nose had him convinced – just for a second – he was in a coffin, and he’d been too busy chastising himself for doing something as clichéd as drinking himself to death to think about random musings from a drunken stranger. Anyway, at some point, he’d remembered the words and thought, _bollocks_. Loneliness is a state of mind. See friends in a room and that’s what they are. See yourself alone and that’s how you’ll be, wherever you are and whoever’s hanging on your arm and your words. Got him through some tough times, that. 

He toys with a beer mat and looks out at the cram of faces in the dark, faux-cobwebbed bar, each one there because he asked them to be. Elyan’s in the corner dressed as Shaft – big hit with the girl he’s been trying to pull for a month – and Gwaine’s new housemates Lance and Leon are underneath a pentagram showing off their dance moves to a small crowd of admirers, most of whom are eying their arses with approving speculation as they jiggle in tight white satin. Laughter lifts them all up and together and Gwaine thinks _bollocks_ again, but this time it’s a more irritated sort of bollocks because that gin-soaked philosopher was very nearly right. He’s standing in a room full of people, and _he_ doesn’t care that he’s there because someone else isn’t. Maybe, he thinks, however many friends you see in a room, loneliness is seeing only the person who’s absent and how much better everything would be if they weren’t. Maybe loneliness is a pretend birthday and all the people you invited copping off to disco music you selected to amuse the one person who didn’t show. Marvellous. Thanks for the lesson, life. 

The barmaid – who’s dressed like Morticia, eyebrows so thin they don’t even count as more than punctuation to her expression – wafts over with a lazy, drawled, “Yes?”

“What’s the most amount of whiskey you can give me in one glass?”

“Triple.”

“Two of those, then. Splash of Coke in them to be respectable.”

“Blood-curdling Bourbon or Satanic Scotch?”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but do I have the air of a man who cares?”

She pours Gwaine one of each, and he hands her twenty quid and tells her to get one for herself as some kind of apology for being a miserable bastard. Then he realises that being a miserable bastard in a goth theme pub is probably par for the course and he’s out a few quid for no reason. Arse. The music changes to a track he’s always hated and Gwaine kicks at one of the skulls embedded in the bar. Pain sparks through his platform boot all the way up his shin and he realises it’s some kind of painted metal and not actual skull. Double arse for the agony and the fact that the scuff on the toe is probably going to put a dent in the deposit he left at the fancy dress place. _Fantastic_. 

Gwaine sips at his drink, and just as he’s thinking that at least this is the night’s nadir, Percy – who’s dressed as either David Bowie or Marianne Faithful, Gwaine can’t tell – lurches past and tells him what an awesome party it is. Gwaine claps Marianne Bowie on the shoulder and out of habit conjures something appropriately chipper: 

“Only ‘cos you’re here.”

Percy makes Fonzie hands and staggers away, backwards. Gwaine eyes the clock above the bar – fake femur and tibia telling him it’s nearly eleven – and tries to hurry the time along with a mouthful of cold whiskey and fizz. On any other night as disastrous as this, he’d down his drink and go and join Leon and Lance, flirt with whoever caught his eye first until that seemed like the reason he was there. Tonight apparently he’s wearing some other self as well as a ridiculous costume, because he digs out his phone – with some difficulty since his trousers are drum-skin tight – and lights it up with a swipe of his fingers, checking there’s no missed call, no message, no explanation bleeping on the screen. The reason? 

His name’s Merlin. He’s tall and dark and twinkly. He works at a charity for the oppressed with some toff named Arthur, and he laughs at Gwaine’s jokes, even when – actually, no – _especially_ when they’re not funny. It’s been three weeks – well, three weeks and six months of flirting and edging towards each other in cautious little dance steps in case the other didn’t want to do more than a friendship waltz. They’ve been on one and a half official dates, got naked together fourteen times, and amassed two dozen blowjobs between them. Apparently that adds up to Gwaine being a mere one or two gins from spouting proclamations about loneliness at strangers while they slip, not caring, beneath a table that from the underside looks like a coffin. Idly Gwaine wonders if maybe Morticia has a real coffin somewhere in the staff room, and if she’d let him hide in it and close the lid. Maybe he’d feel less pathetic in the dark.

“Hey, Gwaine. Get it? Like the painting.”

Elyan’s black leather jacket creaks as he leans on the bar, chortling and knocking Gwaine’s elbow. It’s a thing he’s been doing since they met: I can’t stand the Gwaine, it’s Gwaineing men, Gwainedrops keep falling on my head, he’s a Gwaineiac, only happy when it Gwaines.... Gwaine tried to persuade him to make a playlist and get it all out of his system, but apparently there’s no artistry in iSearch.

“You’re supposed to be Isaac Hayes. He’s too cool to pun,” Gwaine says.

“And you’re supposed to be the birthday boy and yet you’re over here moping like man whose mother just found his porn.”

Gwaine rolls his eyes, and Elyan dips down so he can peer at him with some coaxing expression on loan from Disney. Gwaine ignores him because he hates Disney.

“You look like you’re doing all right with Freya,” he says, jerks his head at where she’s standing, empty glass in hand, biting her lip and waiting for Elyan to return. 

“Thanks for inviting her.”

“Least I could do. Good thing someone’s having fun, yeah?” 

Elyan orders two drinks, hesitates until Gwaine raises his glass in toast and shoos him off. He’s halfway down his Satanic Scotch and Coke when a hand lands on his shoulder, and turns him round. The eyes which meet his are Merlin’s, and frantic with apology.

“Gwaine – I’m so sorry I’m so late, I – ” 

“Oh, don’t worry I barely noticed you weren’t here.”

Merlin cocks his head and squints, but before Gwaine can properly decipher the expression he’s tugged into a hug. He squeezes half-heartedly, not particularly in a hugging mood and feeling lightly foolish for the very unconvincing lie. Merlin eases back and babbles, “Arthur’s been in a foul mood all day – like everything in the world is my fault – and I kept saying I had somewhere to be but – well, let’s just say I need a drink. Is this going spare?”

He points at the Blood-curdling Bourbon and Gwaine nods. Merlin takes a sip, coughs, and splutters something which sounds like _Jesusfuck_ , a word Gwaine’s sure he didn’t know before they met.

“ _What_ – ” Merlin coughs again, wipes at his eyes. “Actually, that’s perfect.”

He sips again, wincing as he swallows, and Gwaine feels the ghost of the laugh he would blurt out were he in a better mood constrict his throat. 

“What _are_ you dressed as? I know you said seventies pop stars but – ” Merlin says, eyes falling down his body over an admittedly way tighter than anticipated split-to-the navel white shirt. “Tom Jones?”

“Doesn’t make sense on its own,” Gwaine says. He puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles at Leon and Lancelot. They both turn, showing off their co-ordinating white suits. “We’re the Bee Gees.”

“Cool, Gwaine, very cool.”

“Before they went disco the Bee Gees were not to be sniffed at.” 

“When were the Bee Gees _not_ disco?”

“My lecture on the history of pop music was at nine. ‘Fraid you missed it.”

Merlin frowns, then pretends he didn’t, and takes another sip of his drink, arranging himself into a would-be casual slouch over the glass.

“I didn’t even have time to change into my outfit. What a day.” Gwaine murmurs non-committally and Merlin swallows and goes on with forced cheerfulness. “Thought you’d be limboing or doing flaming shots by now.” 

“Maybe later.”

“It’s nearly closing.”

“Maybe not later, then.”

“You all right?” 

Merlin fingers his nape, gently tugs on the ends of his hair, the way he does sometimes in the morning before he mutters an apology about being needed at work and slides off into his day. 

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Gwaine says, and somehow, within ten minutes, he’s bought a bottle of Satanic Scotch and uttered the words _hey everyone back to ours_ in some kind of misguided effort to prove it.

*

“You’ve created the apocalypse in our sitting room,” Leon says, shoving his sweaty hair back from his face, mouth hanging with horror.

Underneath the pound of heavy disco beats and flashing yellow lights stolen from the road works, Gwaine surveys the party detritus strewing the lounge and leading a path through the kitchen to the terrace’s small yard. Sure, there are a couple of kebabs greasing patches into the carpet and some of the less shatterproof glasses bought it when Percy tried to juggle with them – casualties of him underestimating his own strength and forgetting to account for the lowness of the ceiling – but he’s inflicted worse on his various homesteads over the years.

“It’ll come out with a bit of Febreeze.”

Leon swallows and mutters something about Febreezing his arse into his drink – a violent pink concoction of cherryade, vodka, and schnapps. He claims it’s a cocktail he discovered in Ibiza – _not on one of those awful raver holidays, I went to the North of the island off-season for the Ibicenco culture, thank you very much_ – called a Velvet Buddha, although Gwaine has a suspicion that a) Leon did indeed go on one of those awful raver holidays because when he thinks he’s home alone his bedroom sounds like Gatecrasher, and b) Leon made the cocktail up and pretends it’s a real drink in an effort to avoid the shameful admission that he just likes fizzy stuff which tastes like alcoholic sweets. 

“Far be it from me to pry,” Leon says, very seriously – or as seriously as a man can when clutching cherryade and dressed as Maurice Gibb – and props his elbow on Gwaine’s shoulder. “But you don’t seem very – well, usually you’re more – ” 

He does a little dance with his hands, and Gwaine raises an eyebrow at him in a _what the fuck?_ Leon adds a dozy grin and jigs his shoulders.

“Decoding mime is not my forte, Leon.”

“Just – you’re normally all – life and soul-y. Is it Merlin? You’re usually rather more ins-ins-I want to say _insperable_ but that’s not a word. Insp-insp – no, it’s gone – like limpets.”

He nods emphatically, staggers, and Gwaine catches his elbow so he doesn’t tip backwards through the door to the kitchen and take out the fridge.

“We’re not joined at the hip.”

“Evidently. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to be in here apocalypticing while Merlin’s moping in the yard.”

Gwaine glances at the window, and sure enough, beyond it Merlin’s leaning on the garden wall, drink dangling from his fingers, doing a passable impression of a man who’s world is – if not ending in apocalypse – not exactly spinning as it should. 

“You have a fight?” Leon says, and in case Gwaine can’t hear from four inches away, mimes a very fey person boxing an equally fey shadow.

“It’s – ” Gwaine wraps an arm around him, holds him steady, standing on his toes to talk right into his ear. “I guess we sort of did. But – well, not really. I think maybe there’s one brewing in my head, and I don’t really want to have it but it’s those which sneak out and ruin everything if you’re not careful, right?” 

The creases in Leon’s forehead deepen, and he sways from side to side to the tune spilling from the stereo until it dwindles away to a synthy death. A Bee Gees track floods the room – quieter at least – and Gwaine shifts on his platforms – he’s probably getting a blister – wanting nothing more than to lean into Merlin’s ear and whisper, _see? Pre-disco era and ridiculously cool. In a folksy falsetto soft rock kind of way_. Instead he steals Leon’s glass and chugs down a mouthful of sickly pink drink, grimacing his face into a tight little knot. 

“You really think sulking in here is going to help?” Leon says.

“I’m not sulking.”

“You, sir, are a cranky badger.”

Leon gives him an affectionately admonishing little shove, and Gwaine tuts and rubs at his eyebrow.

“All right, maybe I am.”

“I don’t mean to pry – ”

“Yes you do, you nosey fucker,” Gwaine says, and Leon clutches his chest like he’s been stabbed. Gwaine laughs, and posh secret raver that he might be, Leon’s all right so he goes on: “Me and Merlin – we get along great. Or we _were_ getting along great, and then he wasn’t there, and I was – well, I thought if you’re getting along great you come to someone’s fake birthday. And I know he did in the end but – I didn’t know he would show up – and that’s why I’m moping. Sort of.” Leon’s face makes expressions like he’s doing advanced theoretical maths and Gwaine thinks maybe it doesn’t really explain it at all. “I’ve not the faintest why he is.”

“It’s because he has eyes,” Leon says. “That means he can see you being miserable on your birthday and he thinks it’s his fault.”

“It _is_ his fault.”

“You’re being pettylent.”

“That’s not a word.”

“Yes it is. It’s a hybrid of petty and petulant, the two things you are currently being. You’re making both of you miserable for no reason. Forget that he was late and remember that he’s here now and go outside and have some fun.”

“I’m not going to take romantic advice from a man drinking cherryade.”

Leon grabs Lancelot by the shoulder and wheels him around, pulling him out of the conversation he was enjoying with Elyan’s sister. 

“Tell Gwaine to stop being a cranky badger and go and talk to Merlin,” Leon says.

“Gwaine,” Lancelot says, perfectly seriously – even though he’s dressed as Robin Gibb and drinking something equally ludicrous-looking but green, “stop being a cranky badger and go and talk to Merlin.”

Leon wheels Lancelot back into his conversation with a courteous little nod, and Gwaine’s gaze drifts to the window, where Merlin’s a neatly-framed picture of dejection: head dipped and shaking its way through a conversation with himself. If anyone else had made him look like that, Gwaine’d pin them to a wall and dig his elbow into their windpipe until they offered to make Merlin cupcakes decorated with apologies.

“Fine,” Gwaine says. “But if he breaks my heart on my fake birthday, it’s you I’m going to cry all over. Just so you know.”

He necks the rest of Leon’s drink, wipes his mouth on his sleeve, and heads for the kitchen. Leon lurches into his path.

“Wait – why do you keep saying _fake_ birthday?”

“Long story,” Gwaine says. “Have another Velvet Buddha.”

*

“Hey. I brought you another drink since you’ve barely touched that one.”

Gwaine holds out a mug of Satanic Scotch and Coke, and Merlin worries his lips together and then takes it with a murmured _thanks_. Gwaine closes the door, deadening the Bee Gees as they croon about starting a joke which started the whole world crying. Somehow it makes the small, brick-walled yard feel even tinier than usual, and skinny as he is Merlin seems huge in it. Or maybe it’s not him, just all the feelings he inspires that are dwarfing.

Gwaine sinks down on the step, releasing the zip on his platform boot and wiggling his toes at the chill, starlight-peppered air.

“My feet are killing me,” he says, rolling his aching appendage around. “Well, not the feet so much. It’s more an ankle thing. Who knew?”

Merlin hesitates, then sits down next to him, pulling his knees up and balancing the mug on them, long fingers curled around its curves.

“Are we all right?” he says.

“I’m not very good at this.”

“At what?”

“At this, where you – you know, you – ” Gwaine rolls his eyes. “That there was a demonstration of my lack of prowess in this area.”

Merlin smiles, quiet and not really understanding and maybe a bit scared. And Gwaine doesn’t want to say it, but he does:

“The thing I’m bad at is being with people in a way that’s more than fleeting. My whole life I’ve been a passing amusement – I’m that guy people tell stories about – remember _that guy_ at your twenty-first who set accidentally fire to his hair with a flaming Sambuca? – anecdote without a name, you know? I used to see friends and lovers in whoever happened to be there. And then there was you, and honestly I don’t know what it is about you, but you make me want to stay put wherever you are.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“Only if you're there to stay put with and you want me around. Tonight I thought maybe I'd outstayed my welcome and - ”

“Gwaine - ”

“But then I was an arse and instead of telling me to fuck off like a sensible person, you moped. We’re fine,” Gwaine says, and so Merlin knows he’s not lying he takes the mug out of his fingers, sets it on the ground, and replaces it with his hand, sliding it between the warmth of his palm and the chill of his jeans. 

Merlin turns into him, slotting their fingers together, the other hand brushing his hair back in a way that makes Gwaine feel unaccustomedly shy. 

“Sure? I don’t want you to be down on your birthday.”

“I’ve a slight confession on that front. It’s not actually my birthday.” He meets Merlin’s eye, and they widen, surprised and questioning. “I never usually celebrate it because – well, just because.”

“Just because what?”

Gwaine tuts and looks at the wall, like the pattern of the brick has suddenly become fascinating. Merlin unravels their hands and pokes him in the side with force, fixes him with a gaze which says he won’t leave it, even if he has to poke a hole right through Gwaine ribs and tickle it out of him from the inside.

“Started when I was a kid,” Gwaine says. “My mother could never afford to do anything birthdayish – she’d try, get herself into all sorts of debt – so I started telling her _hey, it’s ok. Did something with my friends yesterday_ to let her off the hook. Habit stuck, even when I was lying about even having friends to do something with.” Merlin’s fingers brush a little path up and down his spine, and Gwaine can’t tell if he means to be soothing or encouraging but either way it’s nice. “But then I met you – and you have all these friends, and they started to feel like they were more than the borrowed kind for me too. So this year I thought why not? Why not have a party? But throw a party on your _actual_ birthday and no-one comes, that’s – you know – awful, so I did it the day before just in case.”

“Did you really think no-one would come?”

“Possibility, isn’t it? I didn’t know before it happened that thinking _you_ weren’t coming to a party I threw the day before my birthday would be as bad as – or worse than – ”

He runs out of words. Merlin drops his head onto Gwaine’s shoulder, and wraps their arms together, elbow to wrist, linking their fingers again when he gets there.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I’m making a cranky badger out of a molehill.”

Merlin laughs, but struggles to contain it, pinching his lips together like that takes back the noise. Gwaine meets his eye, mouths the words _cranky badger_ and sets him off again, and something about the sound and the way it puts a twinkle in his eyes makes all the confessional stuff and maybe even the evening of angst and doubt worth it. 

“Come here, you,” Gwaine says, lifting their entwined hands and draping them around his neck, “I think you owe me a kiss since it’s my fake birthday.”

Merlin shifts closer, a little squirm of mock dissent in his body, one eyebrow cocked as he leans in enough that they’re sharing breath.

“If it’s your fake birthday you only get a fake kiss,” he says, but when he replaces the words with a kiss, it’s real enough – slow and heavy and deep all at the same time.

Gwaine closes his eyes against a feeling like unwinding, the weight of Merlin’s arm bringing welcome warmth as his fingers scuff along his collarbone inside the wide-open neck of the ridiculous Bee Gees shirt he’s wearing. He lets his hand slip to Merlin’s jaw, kisses a little more insistently, finding his tongue and coaxing a faint murmur of pleasure from his mouth, wondering what it is about Merlin which makes his insides fizz like one of Leon’s drinks.

“So, are you going to get needy on me, Gwaine?” Merlin murmurs.

“Looks an awful lot like it, doesn’t it?”

Merlin rests their foreheads together and smiles at him, soft and kind and maybe a bit pleased with the answer.

“You want to go back inside? Leon’s making cocktails and they’re – vile but colourful.”

“In a minute,” Merlin says, drawing him back in for a kiss with a loose handful of his hair.

*

The party has taken the apocalypse down a notch when they edge back in. Leon – replete with a cherryade smile etched on his top lip as he chats up some girl who must have tagged along from the bar – offers them a lazy wink as they head through the pulsing yellow lights, hand-in-hand.

“You want to dance, fake birthday boy?” Merlin says, and Gwaine kicks his platform boots into the corner as Merlin’s arms settle casually around his neck.

For the first time all night he feels like an actual part of the room, and he nestles into the feeling, into Merlin, finding a place for his hands in the dip in the small of his back, his own hot breath rebounding against Merlin’s skin. Merlin touches him – the back his neck and his ear – with a kind of tender savour, like all of a sudden he can see Gwaine’s insides and how vulnerable and close to the surface they are. The lounge sways to _Goodbye Yellow Brick Road_ and they match it, Gwaine rucking Merlin’s t shirt into soft little folds as he scuffs it into circles. He doesn’t really know what the opposite of loneliness is, but he thinks it probably feels like this: like a room full of people, together but oblivious to everything but the person they have their arms in proximity of. Behind them Elyan is dancing with Freya, making her laugh into his shoulder with some pun no doubt – Leon’s managed to get the girl onto the sofa and is talking with a lot of gestures and casual touches about Catalan architecture – and Lancelot and Elyan’s sister are making doe-eyes at each other, his hand on her waist like he’s forgotten it’s there.

Merlin shifts, whispering the lyrics against his temple and playing with the ends of his hair, and Gwaine murmurs: 

“Earlier I remember you mocking me for my implied love of the Bee Gees, and yet you know all the words to this?”

“Was going to be my costume, Elton. Had the glasses and everything.”

“Oh, well then the next time I see Arthur I’m definitely going to have words with him for keeping you late.”

He skims Merlin’s sides with his palms, giddy and warm with it, and Merlin tilts his head and catches his mouth in a kiss, hard and certain and gone too soon.

“My work’s important,” Merlin says. “I’m not always going to be able to just drop – ”

“I know.”

“ – but that doesn’t mean I don’t care and I wouldn’t rather be where you are.”

“Can you prove it?”

“I _did_ get you a present,” he says. “Hid it in your room.”

“Is this a real present or some kind of sexual favour pretending? Either’s fine.”

“I’m not going to do anything remotely sexual with you while you’re dressed like one of the Bee Gees.”

“Well that’s easily fixed,” Gwaine says, undoing another button on his shirt. “I’m only a couple of buttons away from being half a Bee Gee. A Gibbette, if you will. Twenty seconds and I can probably be free of the lot.”

Merlin meets his eye, leans in until his breath makes shivers on Gwaine’s skin. He bites his lip, his hands falling down Gwaine’s chest to rest on his belt with a possessive little tug. 

“You want to prove _that_?” he says.

No-one notices as Gwaine slips his fingers between Merlin’s. And as they sneak out and up the stairs to his room, Gwaine thinks that at least sometimes there’s a benefit to standing in a room full of people, and knowing none of them would really care if you weren’t there.


End file.
